Steven Saylor has a series of books known as Roma Sub Rosa, which purports to be the “secret history” of Rome. In other words, he takes well-documented events but then fashions a fiction filled with conspiracies and murders and undocumented characters that tell what really happened. Lots of fun. James Ellroy does this as well – American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand purport to tell the story of the real assassins of JFK and MLK, repectively.
Other examples? Books or movies?
Max Allen Collins’ fictional detective Nate Heller manages to solve most of the unsolved cases of the early 1900’s. The Black Dalhia and The Lindburg Baby cases have been covered. I’m not a big fan myself, but I have a friend who loves them.
I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. It’s fiction written as if it were a true account secretly left behind by Claudius himself for future generations to find.
They’re great. Both the books and the mini-series.
And of course there’s Harry Paget Flashman.
Procopius’ The Secret History came to my mind.
He had an interesting obsession with Empress Theodora.
Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man and it’s much later sequel, The Return of Little Big Man, give the “real” history of the American west. (The movie is good, but is only the first book and very little of that [much is changed and most sidestories and backstories were dropped]).
Gore Vidal has written numerous “unofficial” histories of varying quality. For the ancient world there are Creation, in which a grandson of Zoroaster living in Periclean Greece recalls a life in which he travelled broadly and met the Buddha, Confucius and ultimately Socrates (among others), and Julian, in which former courtiers bicker whilst editing a secret autobiography of the last pagan Roman emperor (a nephew of Constantine who briefly undid the Christian conversion of his uncle). The style of the latter was copied by Harry Turtledove in Justinian (which tells the tale of the second Byzantine emperor of that name, not the more famous first [see Procopios above]).
Vidal’s American Series tell in several books (Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington D.C., The Golden Era) a history of America from pre-Revolution to Vietnam. Vidal can be wordy and a bit too literarily clever, but at his best (e,g, Burr, Lincoln) he’s very witty and innovative.
Another example I thought of Brothers, which tells the story of Jesus from the point of view of his nasty half brother, a centurion, who uses him for his own ends.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy (fnord) by Robert Shea (fnord) and Robert Anton Wilson (fnord)
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I haven’t read it myself but Two Crowns for America by Katherine Kurtz is a secret history of the Illuminati plots behind the American Revolution.